Barbara Hepworth - Margaret Gardiner

Margaret Gardiner describes her first meeting with Barbara Hepworth in her Memoir, a vivid and personal account of the early days of their friendship in Hampstead in the 1930s, when Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Herbert Read all lived and worked in adjoining studios. Hepworth's circle of friends soon included Naum Gabo, Piet Mondrian, Moholy-Nagy and other refugee artists arrived from Continental Europe just before the Second World War. But it was to Margaret Gardiner that Barbara Hepworth remained particularly close, and it is Gardiner's deep sympathy with her subject, and the close contact she maintained with Hepworth throughout the various periods of her career, which give this account of the sculptor's life and art a more personal aspect than anything previously written.